Even with valuations generally out of touch with reality, there remains opportunities worth pursuing.

Take Suncor Energy. Canadian oil and gas producers trade at historic lows—a fraction of proven reserves, pennies on average earning power. Depressed prices, clogged export routes and investor revulsion have turned an otherwise solvent industry into a clearance rack.

The gloom looks misplaced. Canada hosts world-class operators with best-in-class capital efficiency and extraction costs. Add shareholder-friendly management, rule of law, and mandatory ESG compliance — luxuries often absent in less scrupulous jurisdictions.

The global energy map offers slim alternatives. Middle Eastern supply chains face permanent disruption risk. Venezuela, Libya, Angola and Nigeria are structurally failed states. Russia remains, as Senator McCain observed, « a gas station run by the mob. » Against that cast of characters, Canada looks like the adult in the room—albeit one too polite to capitalize on its position.

Oil itself has refused to die on schedule. Prices held above $60 despite the pandemic and OPEC+ loosening the taps. Demand hovers near records; storage sits at decade lows. “Peak oil” has become the financial version of waiting for Godot: solemnly expected, never arriving.

For investors who think oil remains a staple of modern life but have no desire to gamble on levered juniors with higher torque, Suncor is the sensible middle path. It won’t double overnight, but it has every chance of doing so over a cycle, while its current valuation builds in an glaring margin of safety.

Integrated is the name of the game. Production, upgrading, refining, storage, distribution—one tight circuit, fully owned and controlled, all in the same geography. Syncrude, Fort Hills, nearly 400,000 barrels per day of refining, massive Western Canada storage, and Petro-Canada’s retail network form a system that won’t be replicated, even with a limitless fortune and decades ahead of oneself.

Upstream production of 750,000 barrels per day rests on oil sands with thirty-year reserves, low decline rates, and no geological guesswork. The downside—massive upfront capital—was paid in another era. Today these assets behave like installed cash registers.

With captive feedstock and heavy-crude refineries feeding its own midstream and retail channels, Suncor captures margin the way toll roads skim traffic. Operating costs sit below $30 per barrel; break-even runs around $35. Not bad in a business where half the world operates on hope and subsidy.

The previous leadership bought Canadian Oil Sands at the bottom—textbook opportunism. With capex rolling off and Syncrude now under Suncor’s control, the economics look better for longer. This led management to peg 2021–2025 funds from operations at $53 billion, which may prove conservative.

In addition, Capital returns have become the house priority. At $55 oil, Suncor expects to return $21 per share over five years—$8 dividends, $7 buybacks, $6 debt reduction. Against a $22 stock, that looks less like guidance and more like a flare gun. Insiders, not known for charity, have been buying too.

Risks exist: operational mishaps, another oil swoon, and ESG-driven institutions still spooked of their own shadows. But none of that changes the stubborn fact: Suncor’s cash machine works, and among large caps, near $20 a share, it stands out as one of the finest contrarian bets on equity markets today.